A song for your sweetie, barbershop style

(published in the February issue of Coastal Senior)

She might be at work, putting away files or entering data on the computer.  Perhaps she’s at home, in the kitchen or the garden.  Guys, regardless of where your Valentine is on Valentine’s Day, she probably wouldn’t be expecting a visit from four dapper gentlemen in red sport coats and ties, bearing a long-stemmed rose and a Valentine’s Day card.  Oh yes, and a couple of love songs to let her know how you feel about her.  It’s a unique gift from a unique group of distinguished men; the 13^th Colony Sound, Savannah’s barbershop singers.

“All the guys love the singing Valentines,” says the chorus’s current president, Bob Kearns, 64.  “We’ve be doing them practically since the chorus began, and they are one of our main fundraisers.”  Helping a group of guys with their own unique way of preserving the Great American Songbook is something Kearns never expected to be doing at this stage of his life.

A former board member of the Long Island Philharmonic in New York, Kearns moved to Savannah five years ago after making numerous business trips here doing aerospace engineering work.  “One morning while singing in my church choir,” Kearns says, “a guy told me ‘you’ve got to come with me to sing with this group that meets every Monday night.”  It was the 13^th Colony Sound, and Kearns joined up at a time when a cappella singing appeared to have long since peaked in popularity. 

Barbershop singing traces its beginnings to, where else, barbershops, where four or more men would sing a song without music (or a cappella).  A good example is the 1903 song “Sweet Adeline” which you may remember the Marx Brothers singing in their film “Monkey Business” (the only time, by the way, that silent brother Harpo Marx used his voice in a movie).  By 1970, barbershop singing had undergone a national revival thanks largely to the Broadway hit “The Music Man”, later made into a successful film. 

1970 was the year when what was then called “The Savannah Chorus” received an official charter from the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America.  Someone eventually decided that mouthful of a name was a tad long, and the national organization shortened it to the Barbershop Harmony Society.  Names changed in Savannah, too, as the chapter later became ‘The Coastal Chordsmen’ and, in 1984, the 13^th Colony Sound.

The last few years have brought another renaissance in barbershop singing, at least in Savannah.  “We went from a time many years ago when it was unusual to have choruses with fewer than 40 guys down to a chorus with just 15 guys when I joined,” Kearns says.  Now, things are picking up thanks in part to some innovative marketing, such as the chorus’s occasional get-togethers at Spanky’s near Savannah Mall.  “We’ve got it back up to 30 members,” Kearns says, “and we’re shooting to get it back up to 40.”

 Many of the chorus’s members are longtime prominent Savannahians, most in their 60’s and 70’s.  Then, there’s Dan Gillespie, 89, who as a young man helped build the atomic bombs used during World War II.  Gillespie hasn’t let an Alzheimer’s diagnosis keep him from singing tenor, and it hasn’t taken away his quick wit.  Backstage during one of the chorus’s shows, observing a bit of chaos in getting another act on stage, Gillespie quipped “building atomic initiators was easier than this.”

The 13^th Colony Sound has gotten a bit younger over the last couple years, particularly with the addition of music director Jeremy Conover, 33.  He joined three years ago, and bearing a music degree and a pedigree as a singing coach and champion barbershop singer in the Midwest, brought a more ambitious musical agenda for the chorus.  “We’ve put on two full-fledged stage shows largely because of Jeremy’s work with us,” Kearns says, including last year’s “Remember Radio”, a recreation of an old time live radio show.

Given the ages of many of the chorus members, they also decided to do their best to get the next generation involved in barbershopping, at first recruiting students from Savannah Arts Academy and Armstrong Atlantic State University and, in 2009, forming the young men’s Savannah Storm Chorus.  “This music is our life blood,” Kearns says, “and if we don’t teach those younger guys about it, the music will die on the vine.”  It appears the music is in good hands, as Savannah Storm won a national Barbershop Harmony Society championship for their age group in their first year of existence, and recently went back to national competition in Las Vegas.

Lest you think Barbershop singing is for men only, the Moon River Chorus might have something to say about that.  Joe Ryan, one of three charter members of the 13^th Colony Sound still singing with the group, started the women’s chorus in 1995.  They meet every Thursday at 7:00pm at Whitefield United Methodist Church on Waters Avenue, and all women who like to sing are welcome.

As for the men, “we’re trying hard to have fun every Monday night,” Kearns says.  They meet at 7:00pm at the Benedictine school cafeteria.  Who knows; this time next year you might be part of one of the 13^th Colony Sound’s quartets, singing to someone’s sweetheart on Valentine’s Day.

Note: If you’d like a 13^th Colony Sound or Moon River Chorus quartet to sing to your Valentine, they are available February 10^th – 14^th.  You can make a reservation by calling (912) 351-7388.

Atomic Dan

(published in the News-Item of Shamokin, PA, November 11, 2010)

As he saw history's very first nuclear explosion - religiously code-named "Trinity" - spread across the barely sunlit New Mexico skyline, Dan Gillespie admits his first thought perhaps didn't measure up to the magnitude of the blast. "Well, thank God it went off," was all that came to his mind. Almost immediately afterward, his feelings turned more introspective, closer to those of his Manhattan Project boss, J. Robert Oppenheimer: "I then thought, 'What have we done?'"

Today, Alzheimer's disease slowly robs the 88-year-old Shamokin native of his memory, but it doesn't take away any regrets Gillespie may have had for helping to develop the atomic bomb. He never had any to begin with.

"We knew than the impending invasion of Japan would cost a million American lives," Gillespie says from Skidaway Island in Savannah, Ga., the city Gillespie has called home since 1993. "We also knew that Germany and Japan were working on a bomb. We were way ahead of them as it turned out, but we didn't know that at the time."

Valedictorian at SHS

Gillespie didn't know he would be working on the bomb, either. After graduating as valedictorian of Shamokin High School's Class of 1939, he initially received deferments from the draft when America entered the war as he pursued a chemical engineering degree from Penn State. Gillespie got his degree in 1943 and promptly received another deferment because he worked in what was considered an essential civilian industry. But the need for manpower grew, and Gillespie's number came up, landing him in Army basic training near Little Rock, Ark.

"They assigned me to an infantry unit, but I had also applied for OCS (officer candidate school) as well as ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program) based on my chemical engineering background," he said.
One day during his 14th week of training, a second lieutenant pulled Gillespie off a rifle line to tell him he had been accepted to both, and Gillespie made what turned out to be a historically important choice.
"I asked the officer what he would do, and he said he had decided to do ASTP first and then go to OCS, so I told him I'd do that, too."

Off to Los Alamos

After some training at Ohio State University, the Army sent Gillespie to what appeared to be a mountainous no-man's land; Los Alamos, New Mexico. Oppenheimer, often called the "father" of the atomic bomb, had scouted the mostly desolate area that formerly housed the Los Alamos Ranch School, a private boarding school whose alumni included writer Gore Vidal, an author and political activist. The federal government bought the land that would become the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1942, consolidating nuclear work previously scattered across a number of universities.

Gillespie was told he would be designing an initiator, in essence the trigger to detonate an atomic bomb. In oh-by-the-way fashion, Gillespie was also told that he, all of 22-years-old with a degree but practically no real world chemical experience, would be the only scientist working on a particular type of initiator.
"I later learned they were using a 'shotgun' approach, with several scientists trying several types of initiators until they found one that worked," he said.

Gillespie's approach must have been OK - it was the one chosen for that first "Trinity" test explosion.
"I still have some of the Trinitite," Gillespie proudly says of the glass particles the explosion created from the desert sand.

Gillespie then helped design "Fat Man," the second and, thus far, last nuclear weapon used during war. The bomb named after the character in the novel and movie "The Maltese Falcon" was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945, three days after "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima. Gillespie's work was done, as Japan surrendered soon afterward.

Still active at 88

After a career at Dorr-Oliver, a company that made equipment for separating solids from liquids, where he eventually became CEO, Gillespie retired to Savannah where, in 1950, he had met Juliet Yearns while on a business trip. They would remain married until her death in 2006. Not long after losing Juliet, Gillespie learned that occasional memory lapses he was experiencing were the early stages of Alzheimer's. It may have slowed him down a bit, but he hasn't let it stop him from living.

Gillespie sings tenor in the 13th Colony Sound, Savannah's men's barbershop chorus and doesn't have any problem remembering the words to songs. He also still has his wit; during one of the chorus's stage shows, amidst the frenetic back-stage bustle, Gillespie remarked "building initiators was easier than this."
He also enjoys hot wings from Spanky's, the chorus's local hangout, making him the envy of other older gentlemen whose stomachs can no longer tolerate spicy food.

Telling his story

Most importantly, Gillespie wants to tell the story of the World War II generation to as many young people as he can while his memory allows him to do so. "Fortunately, I remember what happened back then better than I remember what happened yesterday," he said. His dedication to preserving that era stems from a talk he gave to a high school history class taught by his son, David, in Poolesville, Md. "I asked if anyone had any questions, and the first question was from a young lady who asked 'What does WWII stand for?' I thought, my God, we're in trouble if the young people don't even know that." His son helped him make a PowerPoint presentation of the story of his time at Los Alamos to help him deliver speeches.

'He's my hero'

Gillespie also beams whenever he shows off one of his most prized possessions, a letter of recommendation from Oppenheimer himself. "Your diligent work during the most trying times and under the difficult and dangerous conditions that the urgency of the work required was an important factor in bringing success to the project," Oppenheimer wrote. Bob Kearns, the president of the 13th Colony Sound and Gillespie's close friend, describes him in more simple terms, "He's my hero."

Gillespie likes to say that he was proud to have "made a contribution." What he did was take his small town central Pennsylvania smarts and use them to help save the world. Some contribution, indeed.

(Many thanks to News-Item editor Andy Heintzelman for helping to tell Dan's story.)